Biggest gene sequence project to launch

Human-genome-sequencing

La Jolla researcher J. Craig Venter is opening the largest genetic sequencing center in the world, the latest chapter of his decades-long and often historic quest to identify the genes that affect people’s ability to live long, healthy lives.

In making his announcement Tuesday, Venter said he will exploit a major technological advance to sequence up to 40,000 individuals’ genomes a year — a figure set to rise to 100,000 as he expands his purchase of cutting-edge sequencing machines from San Diego’s Illumina.

He raised $70 million to cofound Human Longevity Inc., the company that will sequence the genomes for a fraction of what it cost just over a decade ago. The business aims to make money by licensing its discoveries to biotech firms and other companies.

The sequencing will be offered to patients at UC San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center before being rolled out to hospitals around the world.

In addition, Human Longevity intends to analyze patients’ microbes and metabolic condition to get a fuller picture of their health. This broader approach is expected to lead to better medical treatments, including rejuvenation of old stem cells.

“Knowledge about yourself, your genome, gives you power,” said Venter, 67. “It is probably the most democratic way for people to have control over their own medical outcomes.”

Human Longevity arose from decades of Venter’s interest in health care that dates to his service as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam during the late 1960s. He went on to earn undergraduate and doctoral degrees at UC San Diego, which led to a job at the National Institutes of Health, where his scientific career took off.

In 1991, he developed a shortcut to finding genes that earned him a reputation as an innovator. Venter also became known for fighting orthodoxy, especially after he cofounded Celera Genomics. The company challenged the government-funded Human Genome Project by pursuing a different way to sequence genes. This pushed the government to move more quickly, causing friction between the two research teams. But Celera and the government ended up collaborating, which resulted in a joint draft sequence of the human genome.

As recently as 2001, it cost $100 million to sequence a single human genome. The expense has been falling since then and reached the $1,000 range in January, when Illumina announced that it had developed a powerful sequencing machine. Venter bought two of those machines, with an option to buy three more, believing that they will help identify and clarify which genes help or hurt people.

“This is the ultimate outcome of what we started to do with the first sequencing of the human genome,” Venter said Tuesday from his institute in La Jolla. “This is where I wanted it to get to. As you’ll recall, I was saying the genome race was a race to the starting line.”

The UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center was chosen as a partner because there’s now “actionable data” from genome analysis to improve cancer treatments, Venter said.

“This will be an unprecedented collaboration in the field of cancer and genomics,” said Scott Lippman, director of the cancer center.